resin

I finished another necklace this week with this one being completed last night. With purchasing the bail making pliers this past weekend as I mentioned in this post, I have been able to move forward and complete a lot of projects lately as the pliers have enabled me to create clasps, jump rings, chain links and other hardware that I didn’t have the ability to make before. I don’t have to stop and run to the craft store when I need something as I can now make it myself. It’s very liberating (I’m not limited to what’s in the craft store) as well as allows me to be as creative as I want with my pieces. I promise to share a few tutorials with you about how to use the bail making pliers to create some simple items. I’m thinking that since I have been making and showing a lot of clasps, that I’ll show you how to create those first. Make sure to check back for the tutorials. Now onto the rest of my post about the necklace I completed yesterday.

The pendant part to this necklace was cast out of resin with a bumble bee that I had found a few seasons ago while cleaning. The poor little guy was one of those dead buggers that you find inside your window. He was so pretty that I just had to save him to put into a future casting.

When I finished casting and finishing the resin bumble bee, I mounted the piece to a brass bezel so that I could mount it to a leather cord. The one that I used for this piece is this brass bezel by Vintaj.

I finished the necklace off by making wire coil end caps/crimp ends for the leather cord of the necklace and a hook for the clasp. The Cerebral Dilettante has an excellent tutorial on how to make your own coil crimp ends if you are interested in learning how to make and use these in your jewelry designs. I used 16 gauge brass wire for both the wire coil end caps/crimp ends and the hook clasp.

I’m still debating whether or not I want to keep this piece for myself or not. I’m so in love with it, it might end up in my jewelry box. What do you think?

In my previous post, I had mentioned that I had created screw eye posts from scratch for the resin tile in my turquoise and brass bracelet. I would like to share how I created those with my readers as I am sure many of you have run into the same issue where you’d like to have your own screw eyes for your resin pieces. It’s especially nice when you are working in different metals and aren’t able to find matching findings at your local or online craft or jewelry supply store. The first thing you will want to do is gather your supplies for this. Since I used all brass colored findings, it was important for me to match my wire to this, so I used the following wire for my screw eyes:

Please note that you can use any type of wire for yours, but it is a good idea to match the gauge of your wire to the rest of your project, especially if you are using chain or lots of jump rings. You want the gauge of the findings to match one another so the piece has a consistent weight and holds together nicely.

Next, you will need some basic wire wrapping tools; these will help you form your screw eyes:

To start making one screw eye, cut off about 1.5 inches of wire from your spool of wire.

Using the wire looping pliers, form a loop in your wire by folding it in half.

Hold this loop with your wire looping pliers and grab one of the ends wrapping it twice around the other piece of wire, which will be the post part of your screw eye.

Cut the tail off of the piece of wire that you wire wrapped around the other end (the post part of your screw eye) with the wire/flush cutter pliers.

Straighten out the post part of your screw eye and fix any bumps or irregularities with the nylon jaw chain nose pliers.

If you find that your screw eye post is too long, you can shorten it to suit your needs by cutting it with the wire/flush cutter pliers.

Here are what your finished screw eyes should look like:

They look especially nice when placed into resin tiles as such:

Please note that when I drilled the holes for these, I made it so that the spiraled part of the screw eye would be set into the resin, so I had to use a drill bit that was just a little bit of a larger gauge than the wire I used for this project. This enabled me to be able to “screw” my handmade eye posts into the piece like a regular machine made screw eye. To finish things off, I used Devcon 2 Ton Epoxy to set my screw eyes into my resin title. Thanks for stopping by!

This is my next bracelet, which is made from a resin tile cast with baby pine cones from may backyard and a feather I had found. I decided to use all brass findings for this to keep with the natural, warm coloring of the resin tile. As a result of this, I had a hard time finding screw eye posts for the resin tile that matched my wire, jump rings and chain, so I decided to make my own (as shown in the picture below). I will show you how I did this in my next post, so stay tuned!

Here are the pictures of the finished bracelet. I used turquoise for the main beads of the bracelet and bronze colored crystal beads for the accents.

This next piece is a bracelet that I call the Remembrance Bracelet as the main center part contains some parts of vintage rosaries that had fallen in disrepair, which my grandmother had collected over the years because she couldn’t bear to part with rosaries that she has used. I thought it was very fitting to cast these pieces into resin and give them new life as beautiful bracelets. Here are some pictures of the first version of the bracelet that I made:

I soon discovered that the bracelet was much too long, so I removed a bead link from the center of each side and then the piece was just the right size! Let me know what you think.

Here is my first official post. I am going to keep it short for right now as it is getting late, but I wanted to share a few quick pictures of the necklace that I just finished up the other night. The pendant piece is of a moth, which I found outside my house last Fall, embedded in casting resin. I set the pendant piece on a brass bezel and created the necklace part from brass wire and chain that I accented with crystals and freshwater pearls.